Guest view: Senate lets down American people

This editorial was first published in The Providence (Rhode Island) Journal, a fellow GateHouse Media publication. Guest editorials don't necessarily reflect the Daily Messenger's opinions.

We are tempted, today, to paraphrase the late Rodney King: can’t they all just get along?

“They” are, as ever, congressional Republicans and Democrats. As the experience of recent years has shown, hyper-partisan governance just doesn’t work. Nowhere is this fact more clear than on the issue of health care.

Back in 2010, Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act — better known as Obamacare — without a single Republican vote. While expanding access to health care was a great thing, that approach proved to be problematic.

For one thing, it meant that no conservatives were there to rein in the sprawling nature of the bill. Democrats quite sensibly wanted to expand access to health care. But rather than do this in a simple, modest way — Bloomberg columnist Megan McArdle notes they could have expanded Medicaid to achieve that end — they instead sought to remake the entire American medical system.

They outlawed many forms of private insurance — hence the mass cancellations of insurance policies that people suffered, despite President Barack Obama’s repeated, false claims that if people liked their plans, they could keep them. And they remade the individual insurance market, introducing the Obamacare exchanges. (You’ll recall the major technical snafus that the federal exchanges suffered when they first came online.) What could have been a very simple fix aimed at getting more coverage for poor people turned into a sprawling, Rube Goldberg contraption. It didn’t have to be this way.

Another consequence of 2010′s partisan legislation is that it ensured that the bill never gained popular support, even if Americans liked some of its individual provisions, such as protections for people with pre-existing medical conditions and health insurance coverage for children up to age 26. Loyal Democrats celebrated it as a legislative victory; independents and Republicans fought it tooth and nail, and got elected by running against it, rather than trying to make it work. This clearly demonstrates that ramming through a bill on a party-line vote was not — and is not — a way to generate wide popularity.

Unfortunately, the Republicans have manifestly failed to learn the lessons of the foibles of their Democratic counterparts. Indeed, if anything, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell pursued an even more partisan approach to health care than the Democrats did in 2010. After the House of Representatives passed its attempt at a health-care bill this spring (notably, without a single Democratic vote), Sen. McConnell held a series of secret meetings for select Republican senators — there were no public hearings — and then simply released the bill. He solicited no feedback from Democrats.

Now that bill has evidently collapsed, with four Republicans saying they will oppose it. (McConnell could afford to lose only two votes.) Moderates, including Maine’s Susan Collins, viewed it as too severe and blanched at the Medicaid cuts it included. Doctrinaire libertarians such as Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul lamented that it didn’t go far enough in dismantling Obamacare.

The unfortunate truth is, despite the fate of the Republican bill, Obamacare does need reform. As we noted earlier this month, many of the individual exchanges are tottering. Because customers have tended to be older and sicker than insurance companies originally bargained for, premiums and deductibles have skyrocketed. Consumers need relief, and the markets need stabilization. Now is the moment for modestly scaled, bipartisan legislation that aims to achieve those ends.

Health care is far too important an issue to be left to partisan game playing.